Ismail Abu Shanab

Ismail Abu Shanab (1950-21 August 2003) was a founder and the second-in-command of Hamas under Ahmed Yassin. As the political leader of the organization, he was anti-suicide bombing and wanted to make a lasting peace with Israel. However, he was still assassinated by them during the Second Intifada.

Biography
Ismail Abu Shanab was born in 1950 in the Nuseirat refugee camp of the Gaza Strip, then under the control of Egypt. He studied overseas in Egypt and the United States in engineering, but in the 1980s he met Ahmed Yassin and helped him to found Hamas, a Palestinian terrorist group in Gaza. He was imprisoned in 1989 for his role in Hamas, but when released, he became one of the representatives of the group, becoming the political leader of Hamas when it became the ruling party in Gaza. On 29 June 2003 he negotiated a ceasefire during the Second Intifada, making peace with Israel, stopping a series of Hamas suicide attacks against Israeli targets. Unlike Yassin, he believed in a two-state solution and was against suicide bombings, acting as a moderate Palestinian leader.

On 21 August 2003, Shanab and two of his bodyguards were killed by three to four missiles from an Israeli Air Force American-made AH-64 Apache gunship in the Rimal neighborhood of Gaza City, with Israel claiming that it was retaliation for a 19 August suicide bombing in Jerusalem that killed 20 people, mainly Orthodox Jews. Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade cancelled their ceasefires with Israel and resumed warfare, and suicide attacks continued.